.co.uk domain names: who runs the registry and who can register

Nominet UK is the IANA-delegated manager of the parent .uk country-code domain, and it also runs the registry infrastructure and policy for the whole .UK family, .co.uk, .org.uk and .me.uk included (IANA, Nominet registry services). It's a non-profit, a company limited by guarantee, formed back in 1996, and it sets registration policy for the namespace through documents like the .UK Registration Policy (Nominet registrar resources).

In .co.uk terms, the registry is Nominet: one organisation holding the authoritative database and writing the rules everyone else has to follow. A registrar is something else entirely, an accredited company, one of many high street and online providers on the list of .UK registrars, that takes your order, passes it through to Nominet's systems, and handles renewal, DNS and support afterwards. The registrant is you, the person or organisation whose name is on the registration, bound by Nominet's terms and conditions whether you've read them or not.

Registrars sometimes work through resellers, but don't be fooled by who you're actually chatting to on live support. Nominet's Reseller Policy is explicit that the registrar stays responsible for the registrant regardless of which reseller sits in between (.UK Reseller Policy).

Anyone, anywhere can register a .co.uk domain. Nominet does not ask for UK residency, a UK company, or a local presence before it hands one over (names.co.uk, Namecheap). What it does insist on is that every registrant declares a legal type from a fixed list, UK Limited Company, Sole Trader, Non-UK Individual, Foreign Organisation, and so on, so the registration data at least reflects who really holds the name.

Past that registry-level rule, individual registrars bolt on their own checks at checkout, things like basic contact verification, and a handful of strings are blocked outright under Nominet's reserved names policy, which covers certain government and sensitive terms. None of this adds up to a residency or trading requirement. It is closer to good record-keeping than gatekeeping.

One thing worth watching: some registrars market particular .co.uk names as "premium" and charge accordingly. That is a pricing call made by the registrar or reseller, not a tier documented anywhere in Nominet's own registry rules, so take any premium label as a sales pitch rather than an official status.

A .co.uk registration runs for a minimum of one year and a maximum of ten. The registrant picks the term, it isn't fixed by the registry, and you can renew at any point inside that window (europeregistry.com).

.co.uk sits under Nominet rather than ICANN, so transfers skip the EPP auth-code model used for gTLDs entirely. The ICANN 60-day post-registration transfer lock simply doesn't apply here. Instead, moving a .co.uk domain between registrars works through Nominet's IPS tag system: the receiving registrar simply requests a change of tag.

On expiry, Nominet's published process gives a .co.uk name a 30-day expiry grace period in which it keeps working and can be renewed, then a redemption grace period to day 90 in which it stops resolving but can still be renewed, then five days of pending delete before it drops at a published time (Nominet expiry process). Registrar knowledge bases describe renewal through that window at the normal price with no separate redemption fee, but the fee is the registrar's to set, so check yours. That's changing, though. Nominet is due to move the entire .uk namespace, .co.uk included, to a new platform from 9 February 2027, and third-party summaries of the announced future state point to a different structure: an auto-renew grace period, then a 30-day redemption grace period, then a five-day pending-delete stage (Nominet). Nominet hasn't published an exact restore fee for this future process, and none of the sources here give an authoritative current per-domain figure, so treat that detail as unconfirmed for now.